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8 or 16 GB RAM for my uses?

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Komodo Rogue

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 10, 2010
50
20
Pennsylvania
Hello,

I'm having trouble deciding how much RAM I should purchase on a new base 13" MBP.

I am a graduate student. When I am doing my most computer-intensive work, I have multiple safari pages open, a word document or two, Kindle for textbooks, and at least 3 PDFs open.

All in all, I think it's a pretty light workload. However, on my late 2013 MBP with 8 GB RAM, things really slow down when I have everything open and I try to quickly move between windows, even just copying and pasting text between the kindle into the word document.

16 GB RAM for these tasks seems like overkill, right? But on the other hand, my laptops typically last me 4-5 years, and I'd hate to regret my decision. But then again, if I'm not using the extra RAM, it's just $200 wasted and extra battery drained.

What are your thoughts?
 
It wouldn’t be much of a battery drain if it’s not being used. For $200 I would get the extra RAM imho. Better off having it then not since you can’t upgrade it later on. On a windows machine where it’s upgradable I would say don’t bother.
 
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Komodo Rogue said:
I was really hoping y'all would say "8GB is fine, don't waste your money." Sigh.

Thanks for the feedback!
Click to expand...


Well to be honest, 8gb is actually fine depending on what you're going to use the computer for.

If you're just going to browse the web, send emails etc, you won't notice the difference.

If however you're going to be using programs like Photoshop and Lightroom etc, then that $200 is money well spent.
 
Well, it depends on how much do you plan to keep that mac. If you plan to keep it until-it-dies definitely go for the 16gb option
 
Komodo Rogue said:
I was really hoping y'all would say "8GB is fine, don't waste your money." Sigh.

Thanks for the feedback!
Click to expand...
Yours is a light workload for the CPU, but it can quite possibly consume a bit of RAM. You'll be fine with 8GB if you'd be willing to accept it to be a bit less snappy, or to sometimes close down programs that you're not currently using. But since you're asking, it seems you're not ok with this. 16 GB is a pretty solid upgrade, well worth it. Other than that you can probably go with a base model, even the nTB one if you can find a good deal.
 
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Komodo Rogue said:
However, on my late 2013 MBP with 8 GB RAM, things really slow down when I have everything open and I try to quickly move between windows, even just copying and pasting text between the kindle into the word document.
Click to expand...

I'm surprised it's slowing down just doing that. This is a good MBP and it's got a fast PCIe SSD in that model.
You should track RAM usage using Activity Monitor when using this workflow to see if you're hitting high memory pressure levels.

Which version of Word are you using?
Which macOS version are you on?
 
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drlunanerd said:
I'm surprised it's slowing down just doing that. This is a good MBP and it's got a fast PCIe SSD in that model.
You should track RAM usage using Activity Monitor when using this workflow to see if you're hitting high memory pressure levels.

Which version of Word are you using?
Which macOS version are you on?
Click to expand...

Agreed. You should check memory pressure to be sure that RAM is the bottleneck. In general I agree that spending the extra money for more RAM is almost always worth it if you think you'll keep the machine for a while, but it's best to narrow down the problem before thinking of solutions.
 
drlunanerd said:
I'm surprised it's slowing down just doing that. This is a good MBP and it's got a fast PCIe SSD in that model.
You should track RAM usage using Activity Monitor when using this workflow to see if you're hitting high memory pressure levels.

Which version of Word are you using?
Which macOS version are you on?
Click to expand...

I'm on macOS 10.13.6 and Word keeps itself up-to-date. For any single task, the computer flies, but things get dicey when juggling multiple programs. The kindle textbooks are incredibly image-heavy, same with the PDFs, although the only thing I type into word is letters, and the open windows in safari are just things like google scholar, proquest, etc.

Strangely enough, the memory pressure doesn't seem too bad? When things get choppy and I check activity monitor, the graph that depicts the RAM is yellow, not red (that's the extent of my technical analysis: yellow).

So I dunno, I guess more RAM would be good because I will definitely use the laptop for 4+ years, but it seems weird that I should make a BTO option just to browse the web, read documents, and do word processing, right? I mean, isn't that always the joke on these forums, that non-technical people think they need things maxed out to do simple tasks?
 
Komodo Rogue said:
I'm on macOS 10.13.6 and Word keeps itself up-to-date. For any single task, the computer flies, but things get dicey when juggling multiple programs. The kindle textbooks are incredibly image-heavy, same with the PDFs, although the only thing I type into word is letters, and the open windows in safari are just things like google scholar, proquest, etc.

Strangely enough, the memory pressure doesn't seem too bad? When things get choppy and I check activity monitor, the graph that depicts the RAM is yellow, not red (that's the extent of my technical analysis: yellow).

So I dunno, I guess more RAM would be good because I will definitely use the laptop for 4+ years, but it seems weird that I should make a BTO option just to browse the web, read documents, and do word processing, right? I mean, isn't that always the joke on these forums, that non-technical people think they need things maxed out to do simple tasks?
Click to expand...
Haha well I think the recommendation is base spec machine, but with 16 GB RAM. That's not things maxed out :)

Memory usage or memory pressure is unlikely to be a good indicator of anything. I'm writing this on a 2012 MBA with only 4G RAM. High Sierra 10.13.6. A few things open, light load similar to yours. Memory pressure in the green, memory used ~3GB. But I bet that if you could clone the exact state of the machine to one with 8GB RAM it would use more. The OS adapts its memory use to how much is available, and I wouldn't be surprised if that goes with some apps too. This machine can run XCode, Word, Excel, coding editor, PDF viewers, machine learning, Matlab, various solvers, natural language processing, statistical software, image recognition, etc etc etc. as long as you're not doing too many of them at the same time. You can definitely get by with a lot less RAM than you probably think. This is why I wrote above that you can for sure get by with 8 GB if you need to, as long as you're willing to sometimes close down one or two apps if the machine gets slow.

However, you don't want this (which is fair) and the symptoms you describe above indicates that you currently might have a RAM limitation. So the recommendation becomes 16 GB RAM. And even if your current issue is something other than RAM, the 16 GB upgrade is still a good one to get if you will use the laptop for 4+ years. Other upgrades are certainly not necessary. Your best option might actually be to find a refurbished or lightly used 2017 model with 16 GB RAM. That should save you quite a bit without sacrificing much of anything in user experience. You could get a nTB model too, but they're not great value at list price, so that's not really the preferred option.
 
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Actually, if you're seeing a great deal of yellow (or red), that does mean that available RAM is the problem. That's the whole point of the "memory pressure" measure -- your usage pattern is putting pressure on the resources. You can relieve that pressure by closing down a bunch of apps, but if you need to swap between them quite often and that's a consistent usage pattern, upgrade to 16 GB is the way to go.

Here's Apple's article on the subject: https://support.apple.com/en-us/ht201464#memory
 
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CodeJoy said:
Haha well I think the recommendation is base spec machine, but with 16 GB RAM. That's not things maxed out :)

Memory usage or memory pressure is unlikely to be a good indicator of anything. I'm writing this on a 2012 MBA with only 4G RAM. High Sierra 10.13.6. A few things open, light load similar to yours. Memory pressure in the green, memory used ~3GB. But I bet that if you could clone the exact state of the machine to one with 8GB RAM it would use more. The OS adapts its memory use to how much is available, and I wouldn't be surprised if that goes with some apps too. This machine can run XCode, Word, Excel, coding editor, PDF viewers, machine learning, Matlab, various solvers, natural language processing, statistical software, image recognition, etc etc etc. as long as you're not doing too many of them at the same time. You can definitely get by with a lot less RAM than you probably think. This is why I wrote above that you can for sure get by with 8 GB if you need to, as long as you're willing to sometimes close down one or two apps if the machine gets slow.

However, you don't want this (which is fair) and the symptoms you describe above indicates that you currently might have a RAM limitation. So the recommendation becomes 16 GB RAM. And even if your current issue is something other than RAM, the 16 GB upgrade is still a good one to get if you will use the laptop for 4+ years. Other upgrades are certainly not necessary. Your best option might actually be to find a refurbished or lightly used 2017 model with 16 GB RAM. That should save you quite a bit without sacrificing much of anything in user experience. You could get a nTB model too, but they're not great value at list price, so that's not really the preferred option.
Click to expand...

Alright, I'm sold. Thank you, that was a great analysis. Do you work for apple? ;)

Thanks everyone!
 
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